National Academy of Sciences Requires Industry to Ensure Nuke Waste Safety for 1 million years

[tahrir]

The NAS report had recommended standards be set for the time of peak risk, which might approach a period of one million years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act


Obviously, TPTB are insane... now what?

[Buzz Clik]

1. And if we cannot find a way to do that?

Early in 2002 the Secretary of Energy recommended Yucca Mountain for the only repository and President Bush approved the recommendation. Nevada exercised its state veto in April 2002 but the veto was overridden by both houses of Congress by mid-July 2002.<9> In 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a challenge by Nevada, ruling that EPA’s 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short.<10><11> The NAS report had recommended standards be set for the time of peak risk, which might approach a period of one million years<12> By limiting the compliance time to 10,000 years, EPA did not respect a statutory requirement that it develop standards consistent with NAS recommendations.<13> The EPA subsequently revised the standards to extend out to 1 million years. A License Application was submitted in the summer of 2008 and is presently under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act

Holy shit! Tip o' the hat to the NAS for helping spawn the world's most ridiculous nuclear waste disposal regulation.

So, this crap will continue to languish in shallow pools of water until the end of time? Of course not -- only for 1 million years.

[bananas]

2. Pro-nukes are anti-science.

Something I've come to learn.

[truedelphi]

3. And they not only ignore natural sciences, but human

psychology.

The people who urge us to do the nuclear reactors have a vested interest only in their profits. They always say that safety is important, but when you examine the ins and outs of issues around all the nuke plants, you find even the basics are not covered.

[RC]

5. Actually Anti-Nukes are Luddites.

A realization I have come to.

Wind and solar can't cut it on a large scale. Too much infrastructure required. Ethanol takes too much energy from oil to be feasible. It is barely 1 to 1 at best. To say nothing of using land that should be used for growing food.
The oil is running out and at the rate we are going, in a few hundred years the coal will also.
Without Nuclear there will be a drastic down sizing of living conditions.

[bananas]

6. No, pro-nukes are anti-science luddites.

Either wind or solar by itself can fully power high-tech high-power civilization.

It's interesting you say "too much infrastructure required" when this thread is about the infrastructure needed to maintain nuclear waste for a million years. Add to that the infrastructure for mining, milling, enriching, reprocessing, and transporting all that waste. All that on top of the many "nuclear exclusion zones" that will keep popping up over the years as reactors inevitably meltdown and spew their long-lived waste products around the nearby country-side and urban areas.

Some reading for you:

"The estimates of remaining non-renewable worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 10^24J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuels range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable. Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

And for the very very long term:
"The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization's level of technological advancement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[Buzz Clik]

9. We have, no doubt, the potential to capture a lot of renewable energy.

We have made very little progress in that area. We must continue to strongly invest in renewables with the recognition that it will take decades to achieve the efficiency necessary to provide most of our energy needs. We must have an integrated plan to ween ourselves from oil and to fill the energy gaps while we slowly build up our renewable capacity.

[RC]

11. You do know that banana are radio active, correct?

Have you heard of Breeder Reactors? We do not need uranium for nuclear power. Nuclear "waste" can be recycled into new fuel. Greatly reducing the actual waste to a few cubic feet per year, total, not per reactor. What's left is much less radioactive than just storing the 'spent' fuel. Try that with coal.
France has been recycling their spent fuel for decades and they get 80% of their power from nuclear, selling the excess electricity to neighboring countries.

Also compare japan's nuclear problem at Fukushima with BP's Deep water Horizon and the ongoing damage that caused. The damage in the Gulf is far worse and is still ongoing. More people died. It wiped out living wage jobs for several hundreds of thousands of people. And the Gulf Stream is moving that mess into the Atlantic and points east, killing life as it goes.

Oh, and BTY, that big "Concrete Pump" they are shipping to Fukushima? That is a long reach boom that will be used to pump water into the spent fuel storage vats.
They can't encase anything in concrete till the cores cool down, which will take a while. That is not in the plans anyway at the moment.
The cores are still producing a lot of heat and encasing them in concrete will trap all that heat. Then what? Think about it.

Stop panicking and educate yourself with actual facts.

[tahrir]

12. are you saying the anti nuke folks have a vested monetary interest in preventing nuke energy?

[Buzz Clik]

7. Your learning curve needs adjustment.

The vast majority of the really rabid anti-nukes on this board have no concept of the science of radioactivity, chemistry, risk assessment, or toxicology.

[Wilms]

4. Go. Read it again... n/t

[Buzz Clik]

8. The part that I pasted into my post?

I read it again. I'm still amazed.

Thanks!

[tahrir]

10. it really demonstrates how arrogant and selfish they are

so we will NEVER solve the waste issue alone, let alone accidents and terrorism :argh:

[tahrir]

13. this fact alone should make it clear that nukes are folly